In BtC#2, I highlighted the existential challenges we face as we head toward dramatic shifts in “life as we know it” in the next 15 to 35 years. So far, we have shown little capacity to meaningfully address, if even truly acknowledge, our predicament. Yet scientists have been raising the alarm for decades, and as each month sets another temperature record, we see more clearly that the problem is US. How are we the problem and what can be done about it? In this post, I'll be sharing some highlights from of our predicament and laying the groundwork for further reflection on why we can't seem to get out of our own way and what I think humanity needs to do differently.[1]
In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was established, with meetings, termed the "Conference of Parties" (COP), starting in 1994. Every year since, all of the member states have convened with the stated intent to agree to a process to limit total greenhouse gas emissions before crossing the lines that will irrevocably alter the planet’s ecology and climate to unsustainable levels. Yet since that first meeting, greenhouse gas emissions have continued their upward trajectory every year, even as member states under this convention came to agreement on multiple groundbreaking commitments to reduce emissions, most recently at COP 21 in Paris in 2015.[2] [3]
In Paris, the parties leveraged the climate reports by the world’s top scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been increasingly blunt in its language of the crises we face. The Paris Agreement allows member nations to determine their contributions (NDCs), which was intended to be the first step toward reducing emissions so the average annual surface air temperatures do not exceed 1.5C, and certainly not 2.0C, above pre-industrial temperature average, calculated as the average temperature between 1850 to 1900. At the time, the Paris Agreement was hailed as monumental with a chorus of hopeful cheers and expectations for the future.[4]
Yet less than 10 years on, the global average temperatures have already warmed past that 1.5C threshold, achieving it for the entirety of the 12-month period ending February 2024. Meanwhile, member countries continue to miss the initial targets they set in the Paris Agreement, which are in themselves not nearly adequate to reduce global emissions to the levels required to keep temperatures below 2.0C. We are, as per the IPCC’s latest report (AR6), on an unfortunate track to reach a temperature increase by 2100 of between 2.7C to 4.3C above pre-industrial temperatures. A median of 3.5C, translates to average temps of 17.3C, which would create conditions that would destabilize the fundamentals of our world's ecology that we depend on, and decimate food production and all other human systems. In short, at these temperatures, the vast majority of the human population on the planet would perish, along with the majority of non-human life, and modern society would become a relic of the past.[5] [6]
If we look at the levels of CO2 concentrations over time, the significance and impact of our activity becomes even more clear. In the mid 1700’s prior to the industrial revolution, global CO2 concentrations were 280ppm, which has been the peak of the cycles over the last 800,000 years, but have since steadily accelerated to above 420ppm as of 2023, at the rate of 2.6ppm per year. This level of CO2 concentration exceeds any over the past 16 million years, back to when the earth had a very different environment, when forests grew in places now covered in ice, and oceans covered far more of the earth’s surface.[7]
And while our warming climate receives most of the attention from concerned citizens, our predicament goes well beyond that. The Planetary Boundaries Framework by the Stockholm Resilience Centre highlights the areas of planetary health that are needed to maintain a balance within the global ecology. They include climate, but also land and freshwater boundaries, biosphere integrity, and 'novel entities', for example synthetic chemicals and particulates. In total, of the nine planetary boundaries, we have surpassed six and are on the verge of exceeding another (ocean acidification). And as the planet warms and humidity increases, will we see new strains of viruses, similar to COVD-19. In short, the planet’s overall ecology is on ‘shaky ground’ as a result of human activity and we have narrowed the window for any meaningful remedial action.[8]
I share all of this not to scare you, but simply to address our reality and set the stage for understanding ourselves better. We face an existential crisis that is more near-term than anyone aside from climate scientists and ecologists seem willing to admit. Governments and corporations have known for decades about the risks of 'business as usual', but have engaged in deflection and dis/mis-information because of their incentives for short-term profit over long-term survival, compounded by the human brain's incapacity to process a threat of this nature. And even today, as public and investor pressure shifts some of that incentive toward sustainability leadership, there has developed an entire industry to 'greenwash' the environmental impacts of organizations, while government programs are sold as solving more than they will. No one is being completely honest with the public, but they also seem inclined to maintain a willful blindness to the changes rolling in from the horizon, even as the outlook for their children continues to darken. Our increasing levels of pollution and its impact on the planet’s health speaks for itself, but we plug our ears and refuse to listen and respond accordingly, instead tying ourselves into this modern world we have created in the last few hundred years but are not adapted for - and neither is the rest of life on earth.
That is not easy to write, nor I'm sure to read. It is however important we work on the truth of the matter and how to respond in our own lives. In my reflections, my thoughts often turn to my own young daughter and how soon I will need to explain to her what she will be facing and why. A few years ago, when she was just four, she would consistently pepper me with the question “why?”. I loved that her brain worked that way. It’s a question that we, as adults, seem often to forget or not bother asking. More commonly, we want to know the what and the how, but the why…well, it seems irrelevant to ‘getting shit done’, which has been the motto of many of my corporate clients over the years. But like Simon Sinek has attested to, the answer to "why?" responds to what our hearts and souls want to know, but which many of us were told as children not to ask.[9]
So let's ask the "why" questions: Why do we struggle to responsibly face this reality that we've created? Why do so many people buy into a narrative that is plainly not in line with the facts? Why have we let ourselves get to this place, when so many knew and know better?
As a response to these questions, we can look to the dynamics of our political system and those who profit from "business as usual", lining the pockets of those pulling the legislative and regulatory strings. But if we look deeper at the fundamentals underlying our socio-political system, look deeper into our past, look deeper into what got us here, we might find out a little more about why and then the how of how we might approach things differently. I don't know the answers to these questions, as of yet, but I have some hunches that I want to explore.
Maybe the best place to start is to briefly consider the situation of how our climate and biosphere are in crises. At the surface, we have the activities that generate the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), the levels of concentration and production I mentioned above. We know this increase in concentration is human-generated because of the matching carbon signature (carbon isotopes) between what we are burning, coal, petrol and natural gas, and the CO2 in the atmosphere.[10]
These activities include industrial production, domestic energy use, transport and travel, farming and other land uses (including deforestation), which all increase as our economy and population grow. All of these pump more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere and oceans, resulting in record setting temperatures, ocean acidification and more. Indirectly, these warming temperatures are generating even more warming through events such as an increase in the number and size of forest fires that release more CO2 from burning vegetation. Additionally, warming temperatures melt the glaciers and sea ice that had been reflecting some of the sun's ultraviolet rays back through the atmosphere and away from the planet. As that reflection decreases, the heat absorbed by the land, oceans, and air increases. Lastly, warming temperatures begin to thaw frozen lands ('permafrost') in the tundras of North America, Europe and Asia, that release previously trapped methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. These latter three indirect sources of increasing temperatures are themselves reinforcing feedback loops that are likely to continue to accelerate, as reinforcing feedback loops do. Note: Stay tuned for a systems dynamics post in the near future.
In short, we have an increasingly drastic energy imbalance between what is being received by the planet and what is leaving the planet, made increasingly worse, both directly and indirectly, by our activities and the natural feedback loops. Governments have known this for decades. And yet, they, as part of the socio-political-economic systems we also operate within, are not doing what needs to be done.
I hear my daughter asking again: But why, Daddy? We will explore that more - but in brief, we operate via the instructions of our genes and our adaptations to the environment and culture we exist in. We are part of the broader natural ecological system, for which we are adapted to, and the separate socio-economic system, for which we are not. They are in conflict in the physical world and within our own genetic and neural makeup. In today's 'civilized society' we are seeing the results of this adaptive mismatch, between the environment we were borne from and lived in for hundreds of thousands of years and the manufactured environment we have incidentally created over just a few thousand and the last few hundred years. The health of our planet and, I would assert, the health of humans and humanity, are suffering under the weight of this conflict.
I will continue to follow the voice of my daughter, asking ‘why’, as I explore what this conflict is about and the circuits we are held captive by. To break these circuits, we must understand them and how to engage with them differently.
[1] Not to be overly pedantic, but the use of the word “predicament” here is intentional to highlight the fact that there are no solutions to avoid the likely collapse of modern society.
[4] The IPCC scientists should have been this blunt all along, but that is for another discussion about how scientists conservatively communicate the results of their studies and why doing so is ineffective when it comes to raising awareness and generation action. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/paris-agreement#:~:text=To%20tackle%20climate%20change%20and,2015%3A%20the%20historic%20Paris%20Agreement.
[5] https://www.nrdc.org/stories/15-degrees-global-warming-are-we-there-yet#:~:text=Earth%20hit%20a%20grim%20milestone,then%2C%20the%20streak%20has%20continued.
[7] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2023/12/07/a-new-66-million-year-history-of-carbon-dioxide-offers-little-comfort-for-today/#:~:text=The%20new%20assessment%20says%20that,induced%20level%20of%20420%20ppm
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